The Courageous Miss Pat, and Ron’s Mamba Encounter

Miss Pat at The Village Church, receiving her ordination from Dr. Doug Stringer.

Excerpt from Christi’s Journal:

Miss Pat, Jerry Lackey’s mom, killed a snake on Sunday in the Children’s Church tent. Some of the children were screaming as there was a snake under one child’s chair! One of the young men said he was going to kill it but Miss Pat was so fast she beat him to it and grabbed a big rock and crushed its head. She said it was not a real big snake but she thinks it was a kind that paralyzes you. After killing it, she grabbed it by the tail and held it up triumphantly with a big smile on her face! Anyway, Miss Pat just took it all in stride and then came in to the big church and read a very nice poem she had written for one of the visiting teams.

Then tonight at about 8:30 Ron was putting some chemicals into the campus swimming pool and a snake appeared on the surface of the pool and slithered across the very top as though it were ice, staying on the very top of the water! Ron quickly got the basket with the long handle that we use to clean out the leaves and caught the snake and kept it in the basket until we could bring him something with which he could kill the snake. We found a big machete and he killed the serpent. Mason said he thinks it was a black mamba, which is the most dangerous snake of Africa, but we aren’t for sure. (In South Africa our kids called it the two- step snake, because the theory was that after it bites you take two steps and die.) It was dark so we couldn’t tell a lot about the specifics of it. Ordinarily we would not kill snakes, as they play an important role in maintaining the balance of nature. However there are so many children on this campus that we just can not allow such dangerous animals to roam free.